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Thursday, February 25, 2016

NEW StencilGirl Artist Steven Skaggs

We are thrilled to welcome renown calligrapher and graphic design professor STEVEN SKAGGS to the

family of StencilGirl designers.

Have you ever wondered why fonts have glyphs?"It is helpful for font designers to have decorative devices that match the style of the font alphabet," says Steven Skaggs, Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Louisville. He designs fonts, glyphs, logos, and is a calligrapher.The four home decor stencils pictured above grew out of the Rieven™ Uncial Pro font Steven designed in 2011.The original glyphs for Rieven™ "were done as a project to see if I could take a particularly formal vocabulary, a set of simple paddle shapes that are organic, and make them into ornaments to use in typography," he says.

"The idea was to play."

When Steven and Mary Beth began talking stencils it was time for him to play once more.Patterns arranged slightly differently create a symmetry reminiscent of historic Arabic tiles and Moorish influenced Spanish architectural elements.Harmony, Trefoil, Toledo and Fleuron are the complementary stencils he created especially for StencilGirl's Home Decor Line.

Imagination and Innovation, then Art

"I love how the look of something can cause feelings," Steven says. Watching his students create and viewing art is the "miraculous, fascinating mystery" that allows him to stay in "astonishment space" and love his profession.A tip for new art students:"Sometimes knowing is the thing that kills it; sometimes naivete creates something no-one, including the student, expected."

Steven's work is in the permanent collections of the Akademie der Künste (Berlin), the Klingspor Museum, and the Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry. He is author of FireSigns, available from MIT Press in 2017.Discover more about Steven on his website or access his font, Rieven™ Uncial Pro, on Delve Fonts. You'll find his full bio and the stencils he created for StencilGirl here.